Electronic media such as television (TV) and computerized apparatus have many modern roles. Education and entertainment are among the most familiar of these roles. TV displayed electronic games have become very popular and commercially successful exemplars of these media and can be quite useful in fulfilling these roles.
To take advantage of contrasts in lighting sources, some TV based electronic games are used in a darkened or partially lit environment. A game player for example may sit comfortably on a couch, chair, cushion or carpet and use a remote control device to interact with an electronic game that is displayed to them on their TV from across the darkened room.
Some remote control gaming interfaces include a camera device, which senses the relative position of the remote control unit with respect to the TV screen. This provides a relative position input to a processor that controls the game. In such game modalities, the relative brightness of the TV screen provides an effective navigational beacon to achieve this input.
If the game player (e.g., user) moves the remote control unit, its camera “sees” the images upon which it is trained seem to move, thus sensing apparent motion from the TV screen beacon. The game controller translates related input from the camera device in terms of pixels and units of time. However, rapid movement of the remote control unit by the game player can be somewhat problematic. With rapid movement of the remote control device, calculation with the vector information becomes difficult to achieve between successive frames.
Thus, successive correlation algorithms and related processes used by the game controller can experience difficulty in achieving high speed absolute position sensing in free space using the TV screen as its beacon. Synchronization may be lost because, even where the remote control unit is returned to its original position, errors in the calculation process prevent the console from returning the TV screen image to the center of the console. This will typically be contrary to the user's expectation and can adversely affect the user's gaming experience.